


Gnarled and Naked Shadow

by almadeamla



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-03
Updated: 2011-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-23 09:23:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almadeamla/pseuds/almadeamla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shane did it all for Rick, if he really stops to think about it. Set immediately after TS-19.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gnarled and Naked Shadow

It was a stupid idea for the two of them to go out to search for gas together. Sure, there’s the potential loss of leadership for the group if he and Rick are ambushed by walkers, but for three miles it’s just the two of them walking side by side and that is too close for Shane's comfort. The sun is at its brightest and the blue midday sky doesn’t offer a trace of shade. He's sweating something awful.

“You sure there’s a station up ahead?” He’s not trusting Rick’s judgment these days. Not after the CDC salvation that wasn’t.

“Glenn said he saw a sign.” A hawk circles high above them and the distorted fall of its shadow gives it the appearance of being a giant creature with enormous wings.

“Good for Glenn, next time he can haul his ass out here.”

What faith he has in Rick isn’t misplaced. After about half an hour they come to an old gas station that probably looked like a post-apocalyptic mess when it was fully operational. The pavement hasn’t been repaired in years and the only things up to date in the place are the pumps. There are four cars parked in the lot. They were in the process of filling up when something got the people inside them, something alive or dead. One of the cars, a top of the line mini-van, the kind with automatic doors, has a booster seat in the back. There is half a toddler still strapped into it. The poor kid is missing two limbs and his intestines, plus the human part of his face. His small gut is full of nothing but dried blood.

“Tanks are full.” Good news at last. Rick holds the hose while Shane sucks until the gas touches his lips, then they wait while the tank empties into their canisters.

“This is the first good thing to happen today.”

“Day isn’t over yet.” He wonders when Rick became the optimist out of the two of them. As they wait, a breeze comes in from the east and it’s almost enough to blow the smell of the bodies around them away. He misses their camp by the rock quarry; out there in the mountains he had almost forgotten the rank stench of decomposition.

“I guess not.” He turns to Rick and looks at him. Life outside has burnt some color into Rick’s cheeks. He’s lost the pale, hospital-patient quality he had that last time Shane saw him. Before everything got too complicated, before Rick came back and ruined what he’d forged from the scraps of his old life. He won’t deny it’s a selfish thought. He thinks he’s earned the right to be a little selfish.

Shane knows he shouldn’t, but the thickness of the heat in the summer air is making him crazy. The sun is getting into his blood, boiling it until it bubbles, and low in his belly he feels like his blood is scalding him alive.

He kisses Rick because he can’t hit him, because his go-to methods for problem solving are to fight or to fuck and in this situation fighting won’t do him a lick of good. Rick makes a surprised sound, sharp and low in his throat. Shane gets a chance to feel the scratch and burn of Rick’s stubble against the corners of his mouth before he’s forcefully, but gently pushed away. He wishes that for once Rick could be the bad guy, that Rick would hit him, that he’d have his high horse jump down off the pedestal of _niceness_ that he lives on.

“Shane,” Rick starts, clearly at a loss for words. He rubs his palm over his mouth deliberately to emphasize that he’s wiping Shane’s kiss away. It should hurt but it doesn’t. Rejection is just another thing he’s had to learn to live with. Didn’t used to be that way, but the dead also used to stay dead and happiness was something that didn’t only come in fleeting moments that are few and far between. “What the hell are you doing?”

He can’t do anything but laugh. It makes sense, in a twisted up way, if he really stops to think about it. There’s a line somewhere drawn in eraser shavings that he’s stepped over; that boundary between friendship and loyalty and obsession. It was for Rick, all of it. He saved Lori and Carl for Rick, in his memory, and he loves Lori, he does, but he probably loved Rick first, in a different way. Everything about the whole concept is new to him. He’s never had to love anyone but himself. “Shane, come on, give me an answer.” Rick’s eyes are round as the state quarters Shane’s old uncle used to collect before he passed away.

He wants to say that he’s fucked Rick’s wife and wondered how the two of them had done it, if the two of them moved together in the same way. He wants Rick to hurt him for what he almost did to Lori, to tear flesh and break bone to match the guilt that’s bruising him in the places he can’t see, the places that are in the delicate, intricate human brain. People say it’s your heart that’s capable of breaking but Jenner taught them that it’s your whatever-cortex; the thing inside your head that can make pain spread out your skull and down your spine and into your heart.

“I don’t think I got one.” He has one, maybe, deep down. The truth would be too much to handle. It’s so much easier to live with the lies. Rick’s his best friend and he hates him for having everything Shane didn’t know he wanted. It’s crazy stupid. When he was eight and jealous of the neighbor kid’s new bike, his mawmaw told him that no one could make him want anything but himself. Wasn’t right to be upset with the person who had what you wanted, she said, ‘cause there were only two things that would ever happen on God’s green earth. You either get it or forget about it. That was the natural way. Problem is, he can’t make himself forget and the only way to get it would to be to steal from someone else.

“You’re just stressed out.” Rick stands a little closer to him until they’re both in the shade of one of the gas pumps. “This stuff.” He gestures to nothing in particular. “It gets to you, makes you feel like you’re inside out.”

“Yeah,” Shane says even though his mouth has gone cotton dry. He can taste his dried out spit and it’s stringy and bitter, salty and sick. “That’s a good way to put it.”

“We’re all a bit out of our head sometimes.” What Rick means is that he forgives him, even though he’s done so much shit. This is nothing compared to the rest of it. He deserves some anger, a touch of vengeance, for Rick to push him down and fuck him up. He knows which buttons to push to get Rick riled up. Before you can trust a guy watching your back you gotta learn what makes him tick; rule number one of self-preservation.

“Are we all fags sometimes too?” It’s an ugly word to use considering the circumstances. On the force it was about being politically correct, no faggots or fairies, cunts or dykes or whores, it was _homosexual_ and _heterosexual_ , civilian or perp. But it’s not that simple, because one day a guy wants to be his best friend and the next he’s thinking that if he can’t _be_ him, then being with him is the next best thing. The barrier between sanity and insanity is made of glass stretched paper-thin, one nudge, a little pressure, and it’ll crumble to pieces in his hands.

He pushes Rick until he’s got his back against one of the pumps, right where men and women in a hurry used to swipe their credit cards rather than go inside and pay. He’s on Rick, with the full extent of his weight. It’s déjà-vu except Rick has the strength to break away, to punch him out. The equal playing field makes it easier for him to tug open Rick’s pants, slide his hands in. Rick’s not hard, but a touch is a touch, in the end it doesn’t matter who it’s coming from. He decides to go out with a bang, do this kind of thing _right_ and sinks to his knees. He doesn’t get more than a mouthful, barely half a lick, when Rick’s knee slams into his chin. Stunned period over, Rick is in cop-mode again, and Shane is subdued, face-first on the pavement, Rick’s body against the line of his spine.

“I’m only going to tell you one last time to _stop_. Hear me?”

Loud and clear, problem is he feels Rick too. A boner is a pretty hard thing to hide when you’ve got your chest against someone’s back.

“Do it,” he pants because he can’t find his voice. He feels like someone has wrapped elastic bands around his throat, tight as can be. He tastes blood in his mouth and the scrapes on his palms from where he hit the asphalt sting and pulse hot with every beat of his heart. “Just fucking do it.” He uses what leverage he has to grind up dirty and slow like a whore that’s begging for it.

Rick lets out a breath and Shane loosens his belt enough for his pants to be yanked down past his the middle of his thighs. Leg’s awkwardly spread, his right cheek against dry concrete, loose pebbles, and he’s never been harder. Rick forces his way in, good old All-American Rick who doesn’t know shit about the logistics of this whole thing, and the pain only spikes his blood with adrenaline, heightens the arousal. He’s been with enough kinds of girls to know what you can mix with pleasure, how far the right amount of hurt can go.

Rick won’t fuck him like he wants it. His movements are slow, steady, rhythmic as the flow of ocean waves. Rick doesn’t go for it, he reins that passion in check. Shane wants it harder, he wants to bleed. There is gravel digging into his forearms, the palms of his hands, and an unusually sharp stone is jammed against the lower part of his jaw. He’d be uncomfortable if he wasn’t so turned on. He takes it in stride, because damn if this isn’t what he was made for. He has sweat in his eyes and he can’t hear anything but the slick sound of skin on skin over cement. A walker could shuffle right up, all groaning, rotten flesh, and he wouldn’t know it. He gets off on that too, the prospect of death and danger. You never really know what really gets your fire going until the flames have turned into an inferno and the smoke is so dense you can’t breathe or see. He knows then it’s not the heat in his blood that’s making him crazy. It’s anger, blind and intense fury that is clogging up his arteries and veins.

It’s over in just a few minutes. Rick’s heart isn’t in it and he comes quiet, even though Shane knows he’s the type of guy that likes to moan his partner’s name. Rick is silent and his lips are set in a thin, white line. Shane doesn’t finish, but that was never the point. He’ll think about it later, about the abrasions on his arms and elbows, the ache when he sits or stands, and it’ll be the memory of victory that will feel greater than an orgasm ever could. “I’ll tell you,” he laughs and this time he means it. “We’re both gonna be feeling that tomorrow.”

The look on Rick’s face is nothing short of wrecked. Adultery will do that to a person, he supposes. Rick is only upset because he cares so much. It would be better for him if he didn’t live in a fairy tale land where there were no shades of gray. To Rick there are only people and Walkers, but more often than not it’s the people that are the worst.

“Don’t tell Lori.”

Shane picks up their two canisters of hard earned gas. Underneath the taste of the salt and iron in his own blood and sweat, he can make out the acrid flavor of Rick mixed with gasoline.

“Course I won’t.” Oh but he wants to. Maybe that’s part of it, the _look what I can take from you_. He used to be such a nice, easy going guy. That Shane is dead, that Shane is a walker, decrepit and wandering, and this Shane is all that’s left. What made him Shane went dark when the planet went to shit and who he is now is what came back, it’s the part that keeps him living, up and reanimated. “Let’s hurry back with this fuel, everyone is waiting. Once we’re all gassed up we can stop by to siphon out some more.”

The interstate stretches out in front of them, miles of gray between fields of green. There’s not a walker anywhere. It feels like their lucky day.


End file.
